“When the Shelter Came”

With the group's roots in the green and crunchy Orange Twin collective and group pictures like this, you might get unflattering patchouli-scented ideas of what Dark Meat sound like before you even get a gander at the, um, savory cover art for their newest release. That said, the meaty meandering guitar that kicks off "When the Shelter Came" does clear the air a bit, so to speak. But I guess a group that namedrops Zappa & Beefheart in their catch-all biography can't help but screw around-- instead of following the lead of that promising lead, Dark Meat shifts the gears in the VW party bus and gets "psychedelic."

By that I mean they rut around in the same lava-lamp-lit waters that have subsumed any number of well-intentioned groups. The lead singer warbles like Jerry Garcia ripped him off, the backup singer's Grace Slickness sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a hookah, and the general haziness of the band's shambling lien comes off like the sort of lazy "we mean it, maaaan" nonsense that inspired a lot of folks to tune out and drop back in. That Dark Meat drop that facade and close out the track with a horn-driven outro that sounds like something sampled from an Ethiopiques compilation makes the played-out psych that preceded it even more inexplicable. Word of mouth is that Dark Meat's recorded output doesn't nearly do them justice, and maybe seeing all 15 (give or take a dozen) members crammed onto a little club stage cutting their particular brand of rug puts their scattershot M.O. in a more forgiving light. Put to tape, however, Dark Meat's non-committal stylistic flirting is just a turn-off.